Soup Kitchen Falls Victim To Costly Insurance Charity Needs Help After Years Of Giving

June 15, 1986|By Maria Goodavage, Staff Writer

A sweaty man with a dirty shirt, torn pants and bare feet sucked down a bowl of homemade turkey vegetable soup at the Rangeline Soup Kitchen and drifted to sleep with his head resting on the table.

``He`s definitely on some kind of drugs,`` whispered one of the kitchen volunteers with a silver cross around her neck. ``You should have seen the way he was walking.``

After sleeping for more than an hour with his head where his plate should have been, another volunteer suggested that someone wake him up and tell him to go home -- if he had a home.

``No, it`s raining outside. He`s not hurting anyone by hanging around here and sleeping, even if he is on drugs,`` said Kay Larche, one of the founders of the soup kitchen, west of Boynton Beach.

The man stayed until the soup kitchen closed. The rain never touched him and he left without incident.

``We don`t ask people to prove a need for something. If they say they`re hungry and want food, we believe they`re hungry and want food,`` said volunteer and co-founder Bea Brown. ``We`re not like the government, which can get so bogged down in red tape that people get discouraged.``

That`s the way life is at the Rangeline Soup Kitchen. If you need a place to relax, you can relax without anyone suggesting that you are loitering. If you need food, you can get it, no questions asked.

For the last two years, the soup kitchen has been dishing out meals and groceries weekly to 300 to 500 migrant workers, impoverished farm hands, unwed mothers and anyone else who walks into the dining room.

Now, for a change, the soup kitchen needs someone to dish it a helping hand.

It recently fell victim to the national trend of skyrocketing insurance rates. Its insurance company dropped its liability coverage and the kitchen`s board of directors can find nothing for less than $4,000 -- a huge and perhaps insurmountable increase from its old $750 policy.

Board members are looking for a company to donate an insurance policy. If they have no luck, they will try dipping into their food funds.

If that doesn`t work, the kitchen, which is open only nine hours a week, staffed entirely by volunteers and funded by donations, may have to close. It`s an option the soup kitchen`s volunteers don`t like to think about.

``That means people go back to scratching for bits and pieces like they used to,`` Larche said. ``We don`t provide people with a lot of food for the week, but at least we give them some basic nutrition and a place to eat a couple of days a week.``

They don`t worry about dishonest food pilferers. They get to know who really needs help after a while.

``Certain men used to come in and ask for bags of food and we`d gladly give them what they needed,`` Brown said. ``Then we found out they were selling it to someone for beer. So now when they come in we give them a loaf of rather squashed bread.``

For unemployed field hands like Pedro Vargas Roman, closing the Rangeline Soup Kitchen would make his hard life even harder. He lives with two friends in a run-down trailer a block away and pays $60 a week in rent. He has not had success getting government aid, a problem based primarily on language barriers, he said.

``Coming here to eat helps make ends meet. I only come here now and then but it is there when I need it,`` said Roman, 23, who moved from Puerto Rico nine months ago and hasn`t worked since the vegetable season ended. ``It`s a good place to go when you need soup.``